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Wireless Control System for DC Motor to Position a Dish Antenna Using

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Article · January 2007

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BHUYAN: WIRELESS CONTROL SYSTEM FOR DC MOTOR TO POSITION A DISH ANTENNA USING MICROCOMPUTER
WIRELESS CONTROL SYSTEM FOR DC MOTOR
TO POSITION A DISH ANTENNA USING MICROCOMPUTER
Muhibul Haque Bhuyan
Department of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering
Daffodil International University
E-mail: muhibulhb@yahoo.com
Abstract: This paper presents design and imple-
mentation of a wireless position control system for
dc motors using microcomputer to position a small
dish antenna at desired azimuth and elevation an-
gle. The desired angle of rotation is the input data
of the system. Two dc motors (one for azimuth po-
sition while the other for elevation position) are
used to position the dish antenna. Signals are sent
to the motor control circuit through the parallel
port of the computer. Due to the remote position of
the dish, an infrared transmitter-receiver system is
developed to send and receive the required signals
through the parallel port of the PC to and from the
interfacing circuit to control the motor’s speed as
well as direction of rotation. The motor ultimately
rotates the dish at desired azimuth and elevation
position. Automatic calibration facilities have also
been incorporated to calibrate the system any time.
After the real-time evaluation of the system per-
formance, it is found that the system works very
well.
Keywords: Microcomputer, Position Control, Con-
trol System, Software, Wireless control.
1. Introduction
Communication satellites play a major role in
telecommunication, television and radio signal
distribution, computer communication, mari-
time navigation and military command and
control. Geo-stationary satellites, which were
first introduced during the sixties, now have
increased in numbers because of their immense
contributions to global communications. At
present, the importance of portable dish an-
tenna has increased. In order to receive maxi-
mum signal power from the satellite, the re-
ceiving dish antenna requires correct position-
ing both at specific azimuth and elevation an-
gles. On the other hand, the poor aiming and
tracking are the most common operational
problem with the receiving system. A reliable
and simple control system can overcome this
tracking problem [1-2]. AC motors can be used
44
to position the antenna. But the control of an ac
motor is complicated. Precision control (e.g.
change in dish position at less than one tenth of
a degree) is also very difficult because of non-
linear characteristic of the motor. Stepper mo-
tor can solve this problem. Construction of
stepper motor having small step size is very
difficult and costly. Torque of such type of
motor is also quite low. High torque dc motor
can overcome these limitations. Recent devel-
opment of rare earth magnet advances in brush
commutator technology and advanced manu-
facturing techniques of the Permanent Magnet
(PM) dc motor with ironized rotor and rotor
with very low inertia extends its use in position
control [3]. Thus in this work, PM dc motor is
used to track the dish antenna. Such motor is
driven by continuous long pulse (for coarse
positioning) as well as by short pulse (for fine
positioning) sent by the computer through its
parallel port to an infrared transmitter. An in-
frared detector circuit detects this signal and
transmits the signals to the motor control cir-
cuit. Thus the system becomes wireless control
system; i.e. the motor can be controlled from
the remote position.
Besides, due to aging effect component behav-
ior might change. Thus we may need to cali-
brate the system again. Thus automatic calibra-
tion facilities have also been incorporated. This
is also wireless system, i.e. the connection be-
tween the calibration circuit and the micro-
computer is done using an IR transmitter and
photodetector. To generate pulses for the motor
controller circuit and to receive the incoming
pulses from the calibration circuit, software is
developed using C language. To evaluate the
system performance, real-time implementation
is done for different sample positions with a
prototype dish antenna, and the average per-
centage of position error is computed to show
the effectiveness of the designed system.
DAFFODIL INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 1, JANUARY 2007 45

2. Control System And Software sensor generator and receptor, amplifier, com-
A block diagram of the developed control sys- parator, switching circuit, DC motors with
tem for positioning the dish antenna is shown gears, dish antenna and also a PC.
in Fig 1. It consists of various stages like, IR

Dish
PC IR Antenna
IR Switch DC Motor
and Genera Amp Comp
Sensor ing and Gear
Parallel tor lifier arator
Circuit Circuit Mechanism
Port Circuit

Fig. 1 Wireless control system to position the dish antenna

Dish antenna is tracked both horizontally and
vertically by using two PM dc motors at the
desired azimuth and elevation angles. The an-
tenna may be required to move in clockwise
(CW), counter clockwise (CCW), upward and
downward directions. Thus four pins (2, 3, 4
and 5) of the parallel port of the microcom-
puter [4] are used to send the forward pulses to
The data for the different pulse width (PW)
versus the measured angle of rotation of the
dish has been plotted in the CW and CCW di-
rection for azimuth positions are plotted in
Figs. 2 (a) and (b) respectively.
14

the motor control system through interfacing 12

circuits. After positioning the dish, the motor is
PULSE WIDTH/ MOTOR ON TIME( SEC.)

stopped by plugging [5-6], which is done by 10

sending the reverse pulses of very short dura- 8

tion. The control system is designed such that

the dish is first set at 00 position of both azi- 6

muth (α) and elevation (β) angles by the soft- 4

ware ‘fine.c’, which is also used for fine ad- 2

justment of the dish [1]. If the desired azimuth
angle is less than 1800, then the horizontal mo- 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160
tor moves in the CW direction otherwise the ANGLE ROTATED (DEG.)

motor moves in the CCW direction at an angle

of (3600-α). So, the dish needs not to move 14

more than 1800 for any azimuth angle.

PULSE WIDTH / MOTOR ON TIME (SEC.)

12
After completion of the system design, the
whole system needs to be calibrated for the 10

first time. The software developed using C 8

language, ‘calhor.c’ and ‘calver.c’ do these
tasks [1]. These programs obtain a relationship 6

between the pulse width and the desired angle 4

of rotation for the two motors. These two pro-

2
grams were run separately. The program takes
the desired angle of rotation from the keyboard 0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160
of the microcomputer as input and measures ANGLE ROTATED(DEG.)

the required pulse widths. These pulse widths
versus angle of rotation are then recorded in
appropriate data files ‘calib_data_hm.dat’ and
‘calib_data_vm.dat’.
Fig. 2: Plot of PW versus the measured angle of rotation:
(a) in the CW and (b) in the CCW direction
These plots show a linear relationship between
the PW and the angle of the dish rotation in
both CW and CCW direction after 100. The
initial non-linearity may be due to the inertia to
BHUYAN: WIRELESS CONTROL SYSTEM FOR DC MOTOR TO POSITION A DISH ANTENNA USING MICROCOMPUTER 46

speed up the motor at its rated speed. Piece- used to find the pulse widths necessary for the
wise linearisation is done by the linear regres- desired angle of rotation for the two dc motors
sion method within the two regions (00-100 and in the main program.
100- 1800) to obtain the PW for the desired Besides, due to aging effect component behav-
azimuth angle. The pulse width is found to be ior might change. Then we may need new co-
as follows: efficient to get the required pulse width. There-
h = A + Bα1 (1) fore, an auto calibration circuit and necessary
programs using C language have also been de-
where, A and B = co-efficients of linear regres-
veloped [2]. The task of these programs is to
sion, y = pulse width (sec) and α1 = angle to be check the system’s performance when the
rotated. power is on for the first time. Once the co-
The values of A and B for both CW and CCW efficient for the different regions for both the
rotation are calculated and saved in the files motors have been identified the control system
‘coeff_cw.dat’ and ‘coeff_ccw.dat’ using auto can be used for positioning the dish at our de-
calibration software for all the piecewise linear sired azimuth and elevation angular positions.
regions i.e. in the regions of Once the system is calibrated, the dish is posi-
00 < α ≤ 100 and 100 < α ≤ 1800. tioned at the desired angle by the software
Another curve (Fig. 3) is plotted for the up- ‘track.c’, which calls two function subpro-
ward motion. This plot is nonlinear too. It may grams ‘hor_pulse’ and ‘ver_pulse’ to calculate
be due to the shifting of the control system’s the pulse widths for horizonatal and vertifcal
gravity center during upward motion. As the motors respectively. Then the software ‘fine.c’
vertical motor has fewer loads than that of the can do the fine adjustments.
horizontal motor (which also moves the verti-
cal motor), initial non-linearity due to inertia is
3. Signal Transmission And Reception
less predominant here. The piecewise linearisa-
In case of signal transmission and reception,
tion is done within the 9 regions (0-100, 100-
encoding is an important part. Here we are to
200, ….800-900) to obtain an equation relating
encode digital data of microcomputer into ana-
the pulse width in sec (v) and the elevation
log data and also data from control circuit into
angle (β) as follows: digital data for the microcomputer. There are
v = C + Dβ ( 2) various data encoding schemes, such as NRZI,
where, co-efficients of linear regression C and NRZL, Bipolar-AMI, Manchester, Differential
D are calculated and saved in a file ‘co- Manchester etc. Each one has its own advan-
eff_up.dat’ using the developed software for all tages and disadvantages. In choosing a suitable
the linear segments i.e. at the regions of data-encoding scheme several factors are con-
00 < β ≤ 100, 100 < β ≤ 200, 200 < β ≤ 300, 300 < sidered, such as, signal spectrum, clocking,
β ≤ 400, 400 < β ≤ 500, 500 < β ≤ 600, 600 < β ≤ error detection, cost and complexity etc. In this
700, 700 < β ≤ 800 and 800 < β ≤ 900. work, we choose differential Manchester en-
coding scheme that has a transition in the mid-
dle of each bit period. It acts as a clocking. The
PULSE WIDTH / MOTOR ON TIME (SEC.)

encoding of a bit is represented as ‘1’ by the

3 absence of a transition at the beginning of a bit
period, otherwise it is ‘0’. It has the advantages
2
of self-synchronization, absence of dc compo-
nent, error detection etc.
To transmit and receive signals two C pro-
1
grams have been developed and its flow-charts
are given in the Figs. 4 (a) and (b). During
0 transmission there is a state transition at the
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
ANGLE ROTATED (DEG.) beginning of each cycle and if the transmitted
data is zero there is a transition at the middle of
Fig. 3 PW versus the measured angle in the vertical direc- the cycle. On the other hand, the receiver
tion measures the time difference between two con-
secutive state transitions. If the transition time
Thus we get a set of linear equations using is smaller than or equal to the half cycle
these co-efficient as in (1) and (2). These are
DAFFODIL INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 1, JANUARY 2007 47

time*6.0/5.0 then the current bit is represented transition. If the transition time is greater than
as zero and the receive waits for next state half cycle time*6.0/5.0 then the bit it taken 1.

Databit = 1
SendW ord = W ord to be sent

Get next Y 16-bit signal

SendW ord = W ord to be sent transmitted?

Sendbit = MSB of SendW ord

Transmit Databit for half cycle

Y sendbit
= 0?

Invert Databit N

Transmit Databit for half cycle

Invert Databit
Left Shift SendW ord

Fig. 4 (a) Flow Chart for the C program that transmits the signal to the external circuit

Databit1 = 0
ReceiveW ord = 0

Databit1 = Bit on transmitted line

Start = clock()
Databit1 = Databit2

N databit1 !=
databit2 ?
Databit2 = bit on transmitted line

End = clock() Bit 1 is detected

LeftShift ReceiveW ord
Databit2 = Bit on transmitted line
ReceiveW ord = ReceiveW ord + 1

databit1 != N
databit2 ?

Time.Diff = End - Start

Bit 0 is detected Databit1 = Databit2
LeftShift ReceiveW ord

Time.Diff <=
HalfCycle*6.0/5.0
?

Fig. 4 (b) Flow Chart for the C program that receive the signal from the external circuit

4. Hardware Description computer with the motor, an interface circuit

Two PM dc motors are used to position the with six different stages is developed.
dish at the desired azimuth and elevation an- Buffer circuit is used for impedance matching
gles. Gear trains are used for both the motors between the microcomputer’s I/O card and the
to reduce the effective speed as well as to in- motor control circuit. The signal from the
crease the torque [7]. To interface the micro- buffer circuit is too weak to drive the IR
transmitter. So, a Darlington pair current am-
BHUYAN: WIRELESS CONTROL SYSTEM FOR DC MOTOR TO POSITION A DISH ANTENNA USING MICROCOMPUTER 48

plifier with high current gain is used. The IR 200

sensor also works as an opto-isolator that pre- MP (Before)

MP (After)
vents microcomputer from any inherent spikes

Measured Position, MP (in Degree)

150
during the turning on and off the motor due to
the inductance of the motor. The IR signal is
then detected by the IR sensor circuit and is fed 100
to the amplifier, because the signal might have
been attenuated in the air. Two comparators
(one for the horizontal motor while the other 50

for the vertical motor) are used to turn on or

off the switching transistors to decide whether
0
the motor will rotate in CW or CCW direction 0 50 100 150 200

and upward or downward direction. Switching Desired Position, DP (in Degree)

Fig. 5 Measured position versus desired position in de-

transistors provide sufficient current to drive grees for the horizontal motor
the motor properly. Delays are introduced in
the software to avoid short circuit between the 100
two transistors while switching. MP (Before)
MP (After)
The calibration system comprises of various

Measured Position, MP (in Degree)

80
light sources and sensors with a calibration
circuit connected to the input parallel port of
60
the microcomputer. The light source is
mounted on the base of the dish antenna. The
base rotates the same degree as the dish moves. 40

At 10°, 90°, 270° and 350° positions, 4 sensors

are placed on the base of the horizontal motor. 20

At 10°, 20°, 30°, 40°, 50°, 60°, 70°, 80° and

90° positions, 9 sensors are set on the base of 0
0 20 40 60 80 100
the vertical motor as vertical motor shows Desired Position, DP (in Degree)

much non-linearity in the curve.
Fro automatic calibration, att first, the light
source is kept at 0° position. As soon as the
program runs, the motor starts to move and
also the dish and the microcomputer scans its
input port. The software measures the total
time elapsed. When the sensor comes in front
of the light source (i.e. at 10°) the microcom-
puter’s input port gets a signal through the
wireless calibration circuit. Thus from the ob-
tained pulse width and the corresponding angle
of rotation the regression coefficients are cal-
culated and previous data files are updated by
the new regression coefficients for both the
horizontal and vertical motors respectively and
later used in the main program ‘track.c’.
5. System Performance Evaluation
A prototype dish antenna is constructed using
the aluminium foil to test the developed dish
antenna position control system. The evalua-
tion of the system performance is carried out
by plotting the curves of measured position
versus desired position in degrees before and
after the autocalibration is done.
Fig. 6 Measured position versus desired position in de-
grees for the vertical motor
From both graphs in Figs. 5-6, we observe that
the curves become more linear after the auto-
calibration is done for both the azimuth and
elevation position. This signifies the impor-
tance of incorporating the automatic calibration
option. However, since both curves in the two
plots are almost superimposed on each other
thus it means that the deviation from the de-
sired position will not be much higher and it
will be in the tolerable range. Also we have the
provision of the fine-tuning the position of the
dish.
Finally, we compute the average percentage
position error from 18 different sample posi-
tions for both azimuth and elevation positions.
The percentage position error is computed by
using the following equation:
DP − MP
ε= × 100% ( 3)
DP
,where DP is the desired position and MP is the
measured position.
 DAFFODIL INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 1, JANUARY 2007
The average percentage position errors for both
azimuth and elevation positions are given in
Table 1 before and after the autocalibration.
Table 3: Average position error in percent for both
the horizontal and vertical motor
Elevation
Azimuth Position
Position
CW CCW UP
Before
2.75 % 3.21 % 4.50 %
Calibration
After Cali-
0.20 % 0.24 % 0.25 %
bration
Table shows a very good agreement between
the desired position and the position obtained
by the developed control system. No error is
found in the case of fine positioning (i.e. rotat-
ing the dish less than 10 in the case of both
azimuth and elevation positions).
6. Conclusions
The developed control system is tested for po-
sitioning a prototype dish. However this sys-
tem can also be employed for positioning a
commercially available dish antenna by only
changing the ratings of the circuit components.
The system performance can further be tested
by receiving the original satellite signal.
Since infrared transmitter is being used proper
filtering must be taken so that the photo-
detector is not affected by the other ambient
lights. During wireless communication if any
data loss occurs then the dish may not be posi-
tioned properly. Appropriate coding scheme
may be used to avoid data loss. If the distance
is higher then the power of IR transmitter
should be increased. This can be done using
the Darlington pair transistor that has high cur-
rent gain.
There is no problem in this system due to aging
effect of the system hardware. Feedback can be
incorporated with this system as further devel-
opment. This system can also be implemented
by using 8085/8086 microprocessor or TI’s
DSP, TMS320xx.
References
[1] P. K. Saha, S. S. Ahsan, M. H. Bhuyan, K.
Islam and AHM Z. Alam, “Microcomputer
Based Dish Antenna Position Control System”,
Proceedings of International Conference on
Computing and Information Technology,
Dhaka, Bangladesh, December 18-20, 1998,
pp. 273-277.
View publication stats
49
[2] P. K. Saha and M. H. Bhuyan, “Microcomputer
Based Dish Antenna Position Control System
with AutoCalibration”, Proceedings of Interna-
tional Conference on Computing and Informa-
tion Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh, Decem-
ber 28-30, 2005, pp. 417-421.
[3] M. A. Rahman, “Special section on permanent
magnet motor drive: Guest editorial,” IEEE
Transactions on Industrial Electronics, vol. 43,
no.2, pp. 245, April 1996.
[4] J. Axelson, “Parallel Port Complete: Program-
ming, Interfacing and using the PC’s Parallel
Printer Port”, Lakeview Research, USA, Feb-
ruary 1997, ch. 2, pp. 17- 31.
[5] C. S. Siskind, “Electrical Machines Direct and
Alternating Current,” McGraw-Hill Book Co.,
1959, ch. 6, pp. 207-210.
[6] C. A. Schuler and W. L. McNamee, “Industrial
Electronics and Robotics”, McGraw-Hill Book
Co., 1986, ch. 3, pp. 42-45.
[7] B. C. Kuo, “Automatic Control Systems”, forth
edition, Prentice-Hall of India Private Limited,
1970, ch. 4, pp. 166-168.
Muhibul Haque Bhuyan
received the B. Sc. and
M. Sc. Engineering de-
gree both in Electrical
and Electronic Engineer-
ing (EEE) from Bangla-
desh University of Engi-
neering Technology
(BUET), Dhaka, Bangla-
desh in 1998 and 2002 respectively. Currently he is
pursuing his Ph. D. in the EEE Department of
BUET in the field of pocket implanted MOSFET.
Since July 2005, he has been an Assistant Pro-
fessor and leading the Department of Electronics
and Telecommunication Engineering of Daffodil
International University as Head till present. He
worked as a Faculty Member in the Department of
EEE of American International University Bangla-
desh from June 1999 to July 2003. He was with the
Ultra-Scaled Devices Laboratory under the Centre
of Excellence (COE) program of Hiroshima Uni-
versity, Japan as a Researcher from July 2003 to
March 2004. He also worked as an Adjunct Lec-
turer/Assistant Professor in the Department of
EEE/CSE of Ahsanullah University of Science and
Technology, Bangladesh and East West University,
Bangladesh respectively.
His research interest includes pocket implanted
MOSFET and SOI-MOSFET, power electronics
and control system, FPGA based system design etc.